where the energy shaping our lives really lies

They say that your brainwaves can be measured even in your little toe — which shows that the energy of your thoughts fills your whole body, fills your whole experience. Normally we don’t realize how much energy we’re giving off, how much energy we’re radiating, and what the quality of that energy is. Only when you make the mind really, really quiet can you begin to sense the shadow radiation put off by the mind. Only then can you sense how much that energy shapes your experience, how much it affects the experience of the people around you.

This is why the Buddha put so much emphasis on the question of intention, because that’s where the energy shaping our lives really lies, in the intentions of the mind. What we experience consists of the intentions themselves together with the energy they create, the ripple effect they create — from intentions in the present and intentions in the past — as those ripple patterns intersect and interfere. That’s what shapes our experience. And one of the main lessons in meditation lies in seeing how that happens.

But even before you see it happen, the Buddha’s training gets you to develop skillful intentions, both because they have a good effect on your life, and also because they make it easier to see what’s going on. Unskillful intentions put up a lot of interference, make it hard to see. You do things and say things that are really unskillful and you don’t realize what you’ve done because you’ve created such turbulence. This is why the Buddha teaches us to practice generosity, to observe the precepts, because the intentions that go into generosity and virtue are skillful in and of themselves and also allow us to see more and more of what’s going on, to gain an appreciation of how much our intentions do shape everything.

When we’ve made a practice of generosity and virtue, then by the time we come to sit down and meditate we’ve already had some experience in seeing the power of our intentions. The meditation becomes a laboratory for experimenting even more, in more detail, to get a more subtle sense of what’s going on so that you can detect your intentions as soon as they arise and can do something about them. If they’re not skillful, you can make them skillful; if they’re already relatively skillful, you canmake them even more so.

You can notice this when you focus on the breath. Your perception of the breath is shaped by the intentions you’ve had in the course of a day." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Sense of Well-being"